Australia has quietly become one of the most active SEO markets in the world. A group of practitioners here are not just keeping pace with global trends — they are setting them. From technical experimentation to AI visibility strategy, the speakers below are the ones worth following, watching, and booking. This list covers the established names who have been shaping the discipline for years, alongside newer voices who made a significant impact in 2026.
James Norquay
James Norquay is the founder of Prosperity Media, the Sydney agency he has built over more than a decade into one of the most recognised SEO and digital PR operations in the Asia-Pacific region. He has spoken at more than 65 events worldwide and organises the Sydney SEO Conference, which has become the country's largest dedicated SEO gathering. His agency won Best APAC SEO Campaign at the Global Search Awards and Best Large SEO Agency in APAC for 2025. On stage, he covers digital PR, link acquisition, affiliate SEO, and how AI is changing outreach and content strategy at scale.
Jes Scholz
Jes Scholz is a growth marketing consultant and self-described SEO futurist based in Sydney. She has spoken at MozCon, SMX Munich, and Marketing Festival, contributed regularly to Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and Moz, and judges for both the APAC Search Awards and Friends of Search Awards. She is the 2022 SEOktoberfest World Champion. Her expertise centres on entity optimisation, brand discovery, automated content distribution, and the structural shifts AI is forcing on how brands approach visibility. She was CMO-level before the age of 30, and that strategic foundation shows in every talk she delivers.
Dan Petrovic
Dan Petrovic is the managing director of DEJAN, a Brisbane-based AI SEO agency, and is widely regarded as Australia's best-known name in the field. He holds two Google awards for exposing internal APIs that revealed algorithmic systems, and applies that same research rigour to his work on machine learning, NLP, and brand visibility in AI search. He is also an adjunct professor at Griffith University and chairs the Industry Advisory Board for the School of Marketing. His conference presentations are known for a level of technical precision that is rare on any stage, anywhere in the world.
Dejan Mladenovski
Dejan Mladenovski is the founder of Shuffle Digital, a Sydney consultancy focused exclusively on programmatic SEO. He brings more than 15 years of experience across agency, in-house, affiliate, and freelance roles, and has completed over 100 technical SEO audits. He founded and ran the Sydney SEO Collective meetup and the OMSYD Conference, Australia's largest SEO event of 2020. His talks on programmatic SEO and technical audit methodology have become reference points in the Australian community, valued for their practical depth and real-world application.
Aaron Taylor
Aaron Taylor is General Manager at Prosperity Media and one of the most technically grounded speakers on the Australian circuit. He has presented on Google Cloud Platform applications for SEO, BigQuery use cases, and the role of analytics infrastructure in search strategy — topics that most practitioners acknowledge in theory but few can speak to with real authority. He co-hosts the Sydney SEO Collective and has invested significantly in developing his craft as a speaker, working with a professional coach and accumulating stage time across multiple events.
Nik Ranger
Nik Ranger is a Senior SEO Consultant at DEJAN Marketing in Melbourne, Chair of SEO Collective Australia, and a Google Women's Techmaker Ambassador. Search Engine Journal has listed her as one of the top SEO experts to follow globally. Her focus is the overlap between technical SEO, internal linking, and machine learning — a space she has made concrete through DEJAN's internal link optimisation framework and the open-source LinkBERT tool. She has spoken at the Sydney SEO Conference and SMX Munich, and consistently delivers technical content that is accessible without being dumbed down.
Destiny Flaherty
Destiny Flaherty is Head of SEO at Princess Polly and one of the standout speakers from the Sydney SEO Conference 2026. Her session, The Ecommerce Playbook for GEO: Winning in AI-Powered Search, used Princess Polly as a live case study to address the practical challenges of LLM visibility for large ecommerce brands. She covered JavaScript rendering limitations, schema markup for AI Overviews, and product feed optimisation across AI surfaces. Her argument — that building distributed influence across search surfaces matters more than fixating on GEO ranking metrics — was one of the more grounded takes of the year on a topic prone to hype.
Lauren Schwartz
Lauren Schwartz is SEO and Content Manager at Maid2Match and spoke at the Sydney SEO Conference 2026 on local SEO strategy in an AI-first search environment. Her session, Beyond the Map Pack: Local Domination, made a simple but well-argued case: suburb pages that could belong to any competitor are not doing enough work. Genuine uniqueness, local data, testimonials, and visible brand personality are what separate pages that rank from pages that sit. Her talk has been widely referenced since the event, and she represents the best of the in-house practitioner voice making its way to the conference stage.
